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Blog: Geofence

- Author: Lieke
Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Flickr has upgraded their privacy settings via a new ‘Geofence’ in order to protect your geoprivacy. Other than either disclosing or hiding your location information, you can now create different circles with a variety of privacy settings. For example you could draw a circle around your house or current location and restrict this to the ´Family´ group. From this circle you could create a ´Friends´ group that casts a wider net of privacy and so on and so forth.

This new way of privacy is like the feature of Facebook where you can limit some of your FB-friends from viewing all your pictures. In case you didn’t want your boss to see you drunk at a party. With the Flickr ‘Geofence’ you can limit your boss from knowing where you were drunk last night.

Here’s what to do when you’ve uploaded a picture to your Flickr account, let’s say from your new house and you don’t want everyone to come knocking at your door. You go to the privacy page and cast a net over your new digs. This way, your family can see where you live, but not cyber contacts or internet friends. It is a matter of protecting your location. This new upgrade from Flickr leads the way to consciously review what you share and with whom. As any user needs to know how the sites that they use work and how to protect yourself.

Although I wonder if you cannot still infer the location of a particular photo taken via minor hacking skills or simply by recognizing the spot. The ‘Geofence’ isn’t fool proof, as this information is still visible when people download the original picture. You can limit this by making your photos unavailable for download.

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[...] give their location away on public Twitter feeds.As fellow Impakt blogger Lieke Kessels reported here, platforms like Flickr have been taking measures to make it easier for their users to control the [...]

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